11th February 2007 Archive

Another day, another silly survey, this time claiming that nearly two million UK small businesses are "putting their data and productivity at risk by using old technology to run their business". Why? because they replace their PCs rarely or never, and miss out on all sorts of good things, such as happy staff, cheaper running costs, smaller "footprints" and lower repair bills.

I'm always a little nervous about the idea of a search engine as the solution to the tide of "unstructured data" we're all drowning in. For a start, most of it isn't really unstructured - show me an unstructured email invoice and I'll show you something that is useless because you aren't sure who it came from and what it applies to. This means that by treating information which comes with structure and semantic metadata as “unstructured” we are increasing our business risk and making our business processing less efficient.

AMD's elaborate and lengthy four-core processor striptease continues this week with some geeky revelations around power saving technology. At the ISSCC (International Solid State Circuits Conference) in San Francisco, AMD will talk up "Enhanced PowerNow!" – the latest iteration of its power tweaking technology due to appear in the four-core "Barcelona" version of the Opteron chip.